Pretoria Student Law Review 2020-14

Simon Motshweni, Adelaide Chagopa, Kayla Thomas, Marcia Van Der Merwe, Nicholas Herd, Phenyo Sekati

Description

Honoured to present to you, the reader, the very first special edition of the Pretoria Student Law Review (PSLR), an annual publication which is the pride of the best law faculty in Africa. The PSLR is a student driven law review that creates an interactive forum for students, academics and legal professionals to discuss topical legal matters that challenge the status quo.Fittingly, this edition endorses articles addressing a critical and topical issue in legal academia: the decolonisation of legal education, and ultimately, the law as a whole. I believe that such a topic sparks important conversations in a ‘post-colonial’ South Africa. I am thankful to Primrose E R Kurasha, Dr Gustav Muller, Prof Ademola Oluborode Jegede and Annette Lansink for building relations that have allowed me the great opportunity to drive this ship, the PSLR, into newer heights by introducing the special edition. I am truly proud of the work that the authors have put into their articles and I would like to thank them for their submissions and tireless efforts to produce quality articles. More-so, I am proud of the Editorial Board for being able to work under intense pressure to produce a publication par excellence. This edition would have not been possible without the dedication and hard work of this dream team. To Adelaide Chagopa, Kayla Thomas, Marcia van der Merwe, Nicholas Herd and Phenyo Sekati, it has been a privilege to have worked with you on this special edition. A special note of thanks to Dr Gustav Muller for his continued and immeasurable support throughout this journey.To you future author, I implore you to start writing, for the water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. To you the reader, Jurgen Zwecker (2018 Managing Editor of the PSLR) was right: enjoy the read — without fear to question what is in front of you, for that is the only way we, as scholars, grow.Simon Motshweni Editor-in-Chief 2020

Sujets

• Droit
• JUSTICE

Informations

• Publié par: PULP (Pretoria University Law Press)
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Photographs by Adebayo Okeowo

Pretoria University Law Press PULP www.pulp.up.ac.za

ISSN: 1998-0280

Pretoria Student Law Review 2020 • 14 PRETORIA STUDENT LAW REVIEW 2020 • 14

PULP

PRETORIA STUDENT LAW REVIEW (2020) 14 (1)

Pretoria Tydskrif vir Regstudente Kgatišobaka ya Baithuti ba Molao ya Pretoria

SPECIAL EDITION

Editor-in-chief: Simon Motshweni

Guardian: Gustav Muller

Editors: Adelaide Chagopa Kayla Thomas Marcia van der Merwe Nicholas Herd Phenyo Sekati

Partners: Annette Lansink Ademola Oluborode Jegede

2020

(2020) 14 (1) Pretoria Student Law Review

Published by: Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) The Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) is a publisher, based in Africa, launched and managed by the Centre for Human Rights and the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa. PULP endeavours to publish and make available innovative, high-quality scholarly texts on law in Africa. PULP also publishes a series of collections of legal documents related to public law in Africa, as well as text books from African countries other than South Africa.

For more information on PULP, see www.pulp.up.ac.za

Printed and bound by: Pinetown Printers, Durban

Cover: Design by Adebayo Okeowo

To submit articles, contact: https://www.up.ac.za/pretoria-student-law-review-pslr [e-mail]

ISSN: 1998-0280

© 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors’ note: Special Edition by Simon Motshweni

v

Introduction to thePretoria Student Law Review: Special Edition on the decolonisation and africanisation of legal education ix by Annette Lansink & Ademola Oluborode Jegede

Historically white Universities and the white gaze: Critical reflections on the decolonisation of the LLB curriculum 1 by Mankhuwe Caroline Letsoalo & Zenia Pero

Transformative legal education in the South African context 12 by Ropafadzo Maphosa & Nomathole Nhlapo

Decolonising legal education in South Africa: A review of African indigenous law in the curriculum 31 by Joshua Mawere

Extrapolating the role of transformative constitutionalism in the decolonisation and Africanisation of legal education in South Africa 44 by Paul Mudau & Sibabalo Mtonga

Breaking the language barrier in legal education: A method for Africanising legal education 58 by Thokozani Dladla

Critical legal education: A remedy for the legacy of colonial legal education? 70 by Emerge Masiya & Given Mdluli

Decolonisation of the law curriculum in South Africa through the prism of a lived experience 84 by Mandisi Magula & Shatadi Phoshoko

EDITORS’ NOTE: SPECIAL EDITION

by Simon Motshweni

Honoured to present to you, the reader, the very first special edition of thePretoria Student Law Review(PSLR), an annual publication which is the pride of the best law faculty in Africa. ThePSLR is a student driven law review that creates an interactive forum for students, academics and legal professionals to discuss topical legal matters that challenge the status quo.

Fittingly, this edition endorses articles addressing a critical and topical issue in legal academia: the decolonisation of legal education, and ultimately, the law as a whole. I believe that such a topic sparks important conversations in a ‘post-colonial’ South Africa.

I am thankful to Primrose E R Kurasha, Dr Gustav Muller, Prof Ademola Oluborode Jegede and Annette Lansink for building relations that have allowed me the great opportunity to drive this ship, the PSLR, into newer heights by introducing the special edition.

I am truly proud of the work that the authors have put into their articles and I would like to thank them for their submissions and tireless efforts to produce quality articles. More-so, I am proud of the Editorial Board for being able to work under intense pressure to produce a publicationpar excellence. This edition would have not been possible without the dedication and hard work of this dream team. To Adelaide Chagopa, Kayla Thomas, Marcia van der Merwe, Nicholas Herd and Phenyo Sekati, it has been a privilege to have worked with you on this special edition. A special note of thanks to Dr Gustav Muller for his continued and immeasurable support throughout this journey.

v

To you future author, I implore you to start writing, for the water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. To you the reader, Jurgen Zwecker (2018 Managing Editor of thePSLR) was right: enjoy the read — without fear to question what is in front of you, for that is the only way we, as scholars, grow.

Simon Motshweni Editor-in-Chief 2020

vi

NOTE ON CONTRIBUTIONS

We invite all students to submit material for the fourteenth edition of thePretoria Student Law Review. We accept journal articles, case notes, commentary pieces, response articles or any other written material on legal topics. You may even consider converting your research memos or a dissertation chapter into an article.

Please visit our website for more information: https://www.up.ac.za/pretoria-student-law-review-pslr

You may submit your contribution to: [e-mail]

Alternatively you may submit your contribution by hand at the office of the Dean of the Law Faculty:

Dean’s Office Faculty of Law 4th Floor Law Building University of Pretoria Pretoria 0002

vii

INTRODUCTION TO THEPRETORIA STUDENT LAW REVIEW: SPECIAL EDITION ON THE DECOLONISATION AND AFRICANISATION OF LEGAL EDUCATION

1

by Annette Lansink* & Ademola Oluborode Jegede**

Introduction

This special edition of thePretoria Student Law Review (PSLR) is devoted to papers presented at a Conference on Decolonisation and Africanisation of Legal Education hosted by the University of Venda 1 and the South African Law Deans Association (SALDA). This was the third event on decolonisation and Africanisation under the umbrella of SALDA in the period 2016 to 2019 and the first devoted to law students.

The reason is not farfetched. While the movement to transform and decolonise higher education has since been on the ascendancy in South Africa, the intellectual voice of law students who are at the centre as both the recipients and the future agents of the discourse is faint. Thus, the purpose of the law student conference was to listen to the perspectives of students and intellectually engage the various meanings and implications of decolonisation and Africanisation of legal education. The conference was premised on the fact that, although postcolonial and post-apartheid legal education in South

* ** 1

Annette Lansink (former Dean: School of Law, University of Venda). Ademola O Jegede (Professor of Law, University of Venda). Law Students’ Conference on the Decolonisation and Africanisation of Legal Education (2019) University of Venda, Thohoyandou.

ix

xIntroduction

Africa has seen many changes, the knowledge systems in the legal discipline remain rooted in colonial and western worldviews and epistemological traditions. The Conference held at the University of Venda on 15 July 2019 was attended by students and staff members from 15 out of the 17 South African law faculties.

We are indebted to Prof Tshepo Madlingozi for giving an insightful and much appreciated keynote address that set the tone of the conference by raising critical questions. Prof Madlingozi posed five ‘provocations’, to wit the possibility of decolonising the curriculum in a colonised university, the need to address institutional racism and its manifestations in the hidden curriculum, the meaning of moving beyond the ivory tower, the necessity to link up with social movements, the importance of critical pedagogy as well as multi- and transdisciplinarity, and the need to develop our own norms and not to borrow uncritically from Latin-American and African-American experiences. In his address, Prof Madlingozi argued for a post- conquest constitution that recognises pluriversalities and emphasised the point that colonialism and coloniality should be made the unit of analysis. He also contended that decoloniality will be disruptive and should not be equated with mere transformation.

The first article in this collection is by Mankhuwe Letsoalo and Zenia Pero onHistorically white universities and the white gaze: critical reflections on the decolonisation of the LLBcurriculumwhich takes the point of distinguishing decolonisation from transformation further. The article critically reflects on the University of Pretoria’s Curriculum Transformation Framework document in which the University identified four drivers of curriculum transformation (responsiveness to social context; epistemological diversity; renewal of pedagogy and classroom practices; and an institutional culture of openness and critical reflection) as an essential tool in decolonising legal education, especially in white universities as it provides in- depth strategies to achieve epistemic justice.The authors, however, caution against an approach that fails to confront whiteness and deep-rooted legacies of racial exclusion and cultural domination at universities. Following in the footsteps of the philosopher George Yancy, the article employs the term ‘white gaze’ which ‘encapsulates black experiences in white spaces’ as a site of power and control that structures ‘how race operates socially and epistemologically’. 2 According to Yancy, the white gaze is a ‘form of embodied seeing’. The authors emphasise the need to dismantle whiteness within the institutional culture otherwise decolonisation runs the risk of denoting change at historically white universities and merely

2

G Yancy ‘Elevators, social spaces and racism: a philosophical analysis’ (2008) 34(8)Philosophy & Social Criticism843.